Retellings of novels like Huckleberry Finn and David Copperfield help to keep the canon alive

It might have lost out at the Booker, but James, a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett, was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction. Everett retells Mark Twain’s 1884 picaresque novel about a 13-year-old boy’s escapades on the Mississippi from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Shocking, gripping and surprisingly comic, it’s a bravura performance that celebrates and subverts the original.

Its success follows that of last year’s Women’s prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a dazzling 550-page updating of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield transported to the author’s home region of Appalachia during the 1990s opioid epidemic. As the supreme chronicler of social injustice, Dickens provided Kingsolver with “a masterclass” in how to use narrative to make readers care about a latter-day underclass.